


days in the sun

by inconsequentialvrb



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Flashbacks, M/M, Meet-Ugly, Multi, Past Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Service Dogs, please read a/n for further tws, roy is straight up not having a good time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:08:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28076739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inconsequentialvrb/pseuds/inconsequentialvrb
Summary: Stepping into the aftermath of things is a funny ordeal, for lack of a better word.
Relationships: Chris "Madam Christmas" Mustang & Roy Mustang, Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 10
Kudos: 52
Collections: Roy/Ed Week 2020





	days in the sun

**Author's Note:**

> alright FoLKS, this is my official first-ever time contributing to RoyEd week and I have brought forth this horrid no-good angst basket with me because I thought I knew how to write concise, wholesome content. Apparently, I do not. That being said, the following story spiraled out of my control into a 20k+ dejected ramble that I then divided into a couple of chapters ~~I'm uncertain about how many for the time being please bear w me~~ so at least its a finished work. 
> 
> The prompt for this one is Modern AU: it started off with an idea about a sad, traumatized, ex-military Roy working a quiet 9-5 in the chem industry but my brain went ballistic on me someway through. I'll let you know right off the bat, it won't ever get too explicit. Tougher topics will be largely dealt with through the optics of emotional turmoil and unreliable memories. 
> 
> Note the following trigger warnings:  
> insects  
> blood and injury  
> suicidal ideation (sporadical, but it's there)  
> mentions of military training  
> disabled character(s)
> 
> EDIT: as some of you may have noticed i accidentally fake updated before realizing i’d uploaded an incorrect + terribly unedited chapter. my dense ass is v sorry about this (as well as how long it took me to put that clarification on here smh) but once i got my shit together the official length of this fic was settled. there are 5 (correct and neat and official) chapters left from here on out 🤠

“it never happened  
but it _seemed_ like  
there were times when rot  
stopped  
waited like a streetcar  
at a signal.”

― Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame 

*

Roy feels the jagged end of a dusty pill catch on his tonsils when he swallows, but doesn’t gag. Instead, he reaches out for the blister pack, pushing his thumb into one of those little thermoformed plastic pockets and snapping another 200-milligram tablet free. 

If three’s a charm, there’s no reason why four or five shouldn’t be even better. 

He’s walking down the halls of the investigation center a few minutes later with a head full of paracetamol and a lingering itch of a thought, telling him he forgot to lock the car again. Slippery brains, flickering moths for fingers: he can’t even hold a key right. What else is new. 

Maybe he’ll go check on it during lunch, but it’s likely he won’t bother.

Technically speaking and officially scribbled in a doctor’s chicken-scratch, he isn’t supposed to be driving around under harsh daylight or any distance longer than the four miles between his house and the supermarket, so if he walks out at six to find his parking spot empty, he’ll attribute it to destiny and leave it at that. 

Out of nowhere, the corner to his left produces a flash of gold that promptly crashes into him in a hurried wisp. A collision like acid lime sizzling on his tongue, getting into the little cuts at the corners of his mouth. Impossible to ignore, that. 

Pausing. 

A flock of papers bursts and flutters to the ground and the next thing he sees is a neat blond ponytail dipping after them with a string of curses. It’s too early for this.

“ _Fuck_ — Jesus,” The kid says. He can’t be older than twenty-one. “care to look where you’re fuckin’ going?” He hisses. 

Roy gets on his knees because it’s the right thing to do; because the medication is kicking in; because he lives in a play and acts out a part and goes back home every day to wash the stares off, waiting for the sun to come out again; again; again. It points at its wrist-watch, it quirks its eyebrow at him like it’s trying not to laugh. 

It’s still too early. 

Drowning in a puddle of celluloid, he finds himself straightening a cluster of odd documents and handing them back, trying not to tremble with the force of — what, a laugh? A sob? The idiocy of it all? 

“Sorry,” He utters. “you got my blind-side, I’m afraid,” 

It’s an overstatement, but bureaucratically easier to say. 

He’s not diving into the peculiarities of his condition with a complete stranger over some spilled milk that looks a lot like paper. 

He’s not saying anything about the surgery nor the shitstorm that caused it or all about the nuances of walking the line between legal blindness and bare-minimum functionality, which is why the floor’s white reflection needles his head and he needs the shades for it. The floor does not mind — which is to say it doesn’t take it personal — which is to put it generously, because the truth of the matter is it doesn’t give two shits about his existence. 

He’s also not saying he _thinks_ he’s doing a lot better than a few months ago because of speculations based on his last appointment with that soft smiling ophthalmologist that asks him about primary colors and tends to feed him very neutral news from nowhere. _‘Did you read that New Yorker article this morning?’_ She usually asks him.

He always shakes his head, to which she then says, ' _Don’t do that; look ahead; what letter do you see?_ ’. 

It was an ‘E’. Not a far away blob of granite. Not peppermint somebody tossed over a white tablecloth. E. This time he got it right without even mildly squinting, which has got to count for something. Even if he doesn’t read the papers and doesn’t watch the morning shows and doesn’t stand tall in front of a window while sipping at his coffee, watching his main-floor neighbor groom the little garden down below.

He’s not saying anything. Mainly because nothing smart comes to mind to succeed the phrase _To make a long story fucking short_ …

But the look he gets in return is positively daunting, like he’s a few seconds away from being eaten alive by a Saharan creature. Sucked into a vortex of that type of wobbly guilt and chest-clenching pity all impaired people know too well. 

This must be the moment in which Blond Stranger here takes note of the sunglasses. Namely the fact that they’re no early-morning fashion statement. 

“Shit…” He says, blinking, halting, adjusting himself to this new piece of information.

An arid pebble settles in Roy’s stomach and he wants to snort it out. He gives a lukewarm smile instead, which must be a horrid sight to see, but hey. He’s got a nice coffee maker; he’s got his taxes in order; his lab coat is always clean. Little else matters to the people he crosses paths with at work. 

“I am… So sorry,” The kid says, flabbergasted, as Roy gets up and dusts his pants off. His tone is earnest and his lustered eyes gazelle-sharp, glimmering-honest, sunset-clear. As with most things in life, this is fine as long as it doesn’t last too long. 

“My uh, my neocortex doesn’t seem to grow out until after caffeine, please ignore me,” He goes on, standing upon the impulse of an airy chuckle, clutching the retrieved papers to his chest with both arms crossed (almost) protectively over them.

He seems new. Painfully so. Roy doesn’t know everyone in the building, though, he could be a new acquisition from the marketing team. Legal. Ethics and compliance. 

There’s no point in staring. 

“Forget about it,” He says after a second, something in his warped core demanding he scrape a sense of anger. Irritation — even just a sliver of it. What for? He forgets immediately. “have a nice day.” He ends up adding, and finds wholehearted meaning behind the wish. 

It’s all part of the process, he assumes — the fact that he’s an articulated model. Individual pieces kept together by taut string, aching to be cut and piled up into a metal box — sort of like the trunk of a rusty car that flies off into the night in a cloud of screeching smoke. 

He hears the storm of emotion happen just above its surface, muffled as the road keeps bumping underneath, distant radio static over a local station’s cheery song. It’s a wonderful thing to simply slide through life instead of sinking into it. 

Roy proceeds to turn on his heel before the younger man gets to say anything else, should he feel the need. He turns back towards the linear trajectory that’ll take him to the main lab in less than two minutes, provided that the eyes now very obviously tacked to his back don’t try to slow him down. 

*

It had happened back in May, a couple of months after Maes Hughes was killed by negligence and the copious amounts of internal military corruption that both of them had always seen coming, one way or the other. 

Roy remembered, as his honey casket was lowered into the dirt and people dropped their last, salty tears on the folded flag on top of it, about that time in training when he was barely nineteen and Hughes was rounding the ‘hungry fangs of thirty’, as he himself always put it. It was the man’s third consecutive tour, he clutched pictures of his chestnut-eyed fiancée to his heart and was one of those funny veterans that weren’t particularly pro-war, but rather stayed in the shit for their pay-grades and the food stamps or whatever the hell it was that made him want to be there, too. 

Roy’d been sitting around after hours of a specific type of drill-practice, one in which you had to pretend air raids were happening left and right. Covering the sky like cloud-shaped metal bugs, ready to rain down on you with heaps of lead and burst your sorry ass clean off the face of the Earth. 

None of them were too worried about it, and after a few hours more came Cpt. Maes Hughes, popping his head from over a nearby hill to let them all know that a hypothetical attack had been underway while none of them were looking and that they were all, in fact, hypothetically dead. 

You had to outgrow the fear of your own looming mortality for this type of lifestyle, so getting fake-killed and smiling about it was actually a win. 

Roy laughed now — an ugly, stuttering type of laughter only his clusterfuck of a grilled cheese sandwich could hear as it sizzled under his spatula on a rusty pan. Distantly, he thought of a time in which he could single-handedly crack an egg and land its perfect, rounded yolk on a pan without looking. Another person. 

Anyhow, it had happened back in May, and so the heat didn’t help any of the freshly sown pathways on his broken skin. 

He’d almost bitten his tongue clean off, his lower lip had also obscenely split from where he took the first fall. There were these tiny blackened stitch points decorating his mouth like spider legs were prodding their way out. He hadn’t any idea how exactly he was planning on actually getting through his meal. 

Humidity did nothing for the smell of drying blood, caked into the faceted edges of where blades or teeth or fingernails had carved him open. The looming threat of insects was also something to consider this time of year, he thought as he tossed the sandwich over, not minding how some drops of boiling butter splattered up to his chin, stinging. 

They fed off warmth, tiny teeth buzzing with hunger and rounding his headboard. A hundred million little eyes. Roy lay awake at night to the sound of crickets; thinking about all of the carrion beetles that probably hid atop the blades on his ceiling fan — which is why, obviously, he couldn’t turn the damn thing on, no matter how shitty the weather got. He’d wake up with holes in his palms if he did, to the tangy sound of his half-eaten flesh. 

When Riza came kicking down his front door, he didn’t step away from the stove as her fuming steps made their way towards where he stood, watching the edges of the bread toast in gold over a puddle of leaking cheese. 

“What,” She intoned, staring shrapnel into his side, “in the world do you think you’re doing,” 

“Lunch,” He answered, breathing in around the tickling pain that suddenly shot through his eye socket when he spoke, behind that damp patch that’d been taped to the side of his face. 

Apparently, he shouldn’t have had the brilliant idea of discharging himself from the hospital just yet. 

He relished the solitude after an entire two weeks and a half of being fussed over, washed and prodded, clipped and clapped, wept over. Manhandled through all the medical motions; interrogated. 

He’d gingerly unplugged himself and inched his way into the clothes that’d been neatly folded inside one of the light brown closets in the room, they were very obviously _not_ the ones they’d found him in. Something about that made his stomach turn on it’s side like a horse having a seizure. 

He fought his maimed hand tendons through the thick and thin of shoelaces and made his way down to the counter, announcing his departure with a breath that tasted of an entire pharmacy. “I’m an adult,” He’d argued, rather feeling like a demented one-eyed child who’d been caught pissing his pants. 

“I’m sorry, sir, we still can’t discharge you without appropriate accompaniment, please wait until our next available social volunteer is here to get you a cab home,” Said a service-industry trained voice. 

He was wheeled out to the entrance bay while they waited and plucked a half-finished cigarette from out of the tiny bits of gravel that decorated a trash can ashtray. 

It had someone else’s purple lipstick stuck to its butt. 

“Got a light?” He asked a bearded nurse once the man pulled the parking lever down behind him. 

“You can’t smoke near the entrance,” He clipped back. Roy didn’t stop himself from turning a pointed look towards the ashtray that stood right in front of them, wrapping himself in misplaced sarcasm to hide how bad this clean set of clothes stung every inch of skin it covered. Shit, maybe he was allergic to chamomile-scented softener. 

“Wheel me further out then,” He responded, perhaps looking too attentively at the way the man licked his teeth. 

His face was distorted, his lips curled in an unrecognizable expression. He said nothing, and the late afternoon wind blew uselessly around accumulated heat on the grimy pavement until Roy felt the need to push himself upright and stand, despite what his squirming, muggy wounds had to say about it. 

Bearded nurse fella, who was an entire head taller, decided to push his body against his own, pinning him between his broad chest and the wheelchair seat that pushed the back of his knees, squeaking.

“You gonna be difficult about this?” He asked, irritation grating his voice. 

Something sparked in him. The breathless catch of a lighter out of fluid. A tone that seeped into his bones and cracked the marrow with a searing red pressure, his knees buckled. 

He tried rationalizing. Nursing is a tough, ungratifying, underpaid job; it builds character. They clean shit, vomit, fingernails. They befriend a nice old lady and she dies merely hours later, falling down the concrete ramp once she’s finally discharged. 

“N-no, no.” He said, letting himself fall back into the chair, obliterated Marlboro in hand. You’ve got to love how deep-seated trained obedience is after years of the army's teacher pet, ultra-nationalist institutional bootlicking routine. They could sell it in cans. 

He stayed put as the man glared a hole to the top of his head, silently going through the newly ingrained mantra _Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me_ . _What year is it? Where am I? Are these actually my hands?_

He got home and the first thing he did was pull some Monterrey Jack from the fridge. It was probably way past its expiration date seeing as he hadn’t been there in a very vague stretch of time (maybe it’d been years while he wasn’t looking) but there were some damp plates resting on the sink, signifying _someone_ had. Maybe _someone_ had deemed it important to sit in his house and warm his vacant couch and wait there until he showed up. Maybe _someone_ had gone out to the grocery store and bought some cheese while they were at it, blessed souls. 

It simmered over Teflon and he laughed at it, a horrible thing. 

“What about this seems funny to you?” Riza snapped as the bread began to actually burn, darkening at the edges, arid smoke sticking to his nose. He didn’t move it. 

“You’re not well enough, Roy. Come on, we’re taking you back,” She held his elbow. 

“What about — lunch,”

Orange light poured in through the window over the sink, people went about their daily business. Spitting on the ground, going the bank without showering, pulling their dogs on cruelly tight leashes, smelling oranges, apples, onions, books. Riza gave him a single going over that Roy imagined was tainted with disgust. He deserved that much. 

Her eyes then dragged themselves over to his right hand, the one holding the panhandle, the one he was forcing into functionality despite the pain. She gave it a pointed look. 

“Do you want to die from untreated sepsis?”

He smothered a tongue that urged itself to say _Why_ , _I’d been counting on it for months._

*

The day elapses with him going through submitted grant proposals and avoiding caustic substances as he makes his obligatory rounds through the lab, taking in his usual amount of inorganic chemicals and repetitive pencil scratch. 

It’s in here, under the artificial grace of LED lighting that he can take the ‘obviously impaired’ tag off himself and ditch the sunglasses in favor of his regular frames. 

Perhaps _that’s_ what catches that same hurricane of a person so off guard when they meet again, two hours after their first encounter, both of them now dressed in the customary white coat that, he agrees, has unnecessary lapels. 

“Edward Elric, meet your new PI, Roy Mustang, Ph.D.; the marvel we managed to snatch from IBM last year, yadda yadda yadda,” Alex Armstrong introduces in that typical sing-songy fondness Roy has no idea where he mines so much from. 

The young man blinks at him with an appalled hesitancy, strung into close succession as the seconds tick by in the background. 

His mouth falls slightly open like he’s trying to catch the right words — ones that might be floating around in the air and land on his tongue if he hopes for it hard enough. 

It immediately clicks. An up and coming young prodigy in practically every field he touches Elric. Graduated from MIT at fifteen years of age with a revolutionary quantum thesis under his arm Elric. Living exclusively on grants and scholarships, no apparent familiar connections, no estate to talk about, no capital of any kind save for the intellectual following he’s begun to gather through the apparent effortlessness of his groundbreaking research; the growing frequency with which his last name has begun to appear in relevant bibliography. 

Indeed, he’d have to have been living under a rock at the bottom of the ocean to effectively evade the last name in the past few years, which Roy hadn’t, but not really for a lack of trying. Oh well. The name is all he really knew. 

“Roy,” Armstrong proceeds. “meet your new auxiliary, and rejoice in HR having granted this area enough budgetary mercy this year,” He adds the last sentence in faux discretion, delivered through the other side of his straightened hand and pretending his very own family didn’t have the capacity to pull some strings for the sake of funding their technical experimentation department, of course, finally giving him the assistance he needed to manage things around here. 

Roy looks at Edward, only this time through the heightened definition of working glasses. Armstrong’s talking merges into the background as he sees Edward’s eyes skate around the place, never quite meeting his. 

Roy then takes his eagerly offered hand without much preamble, trying not to think about the clustered scar tissue on his palm, something he’s made up an amazing backstory for — everyone liked to hear about a youthful night adventure involving pitiable drunkness and getting his hands stabbed while attempting to jump a sharp fence as he ran from the cops. Everyone. They wrinkle their noses a bit and lean back in ghoulish shock, but they always ask for him to elaborate. 

“Yeah, um, pleased to meet you — again.” Edward skates through a breath that sounds eerily similar to an attempt at laughter but seems more like he’s being punched in the gut. 

Roy keeps his face neutral, or at the very least thinks he does. There might still be some of that well-honed snark he once used to bring out for practically any occasion, involuntarily materializing in the form of a slightly arched eyebrow or a knowing glint in his eye, because Edward keeps stumbling through his official introduction like he’s been caught stealing at a dime store. 

“I’m a big fan.” He hurries to add. “Those papers on the thermal appliances to high-controlled surface composition blew my mind; I ate them all up years ago. I — I’ve pretty much read all your work.” He smiles, then, no teeth show, but it doesn’t look fake. He smiles.

“And I, yours,” Roy admits easily enough. He tucks his hand back into the fresh safety of his right pocket the second the handshake breaks.

“Oh? Let me guess,” Armstrong chimes in, alternating a look between the two of them. “you both knew of the other’s research but hadn’t actually seen each other’s face,” Rumbling laughter fills the room, bends the air, Alex gesticulates, but none of them tear their eyes off each other to glance his way. 

"I have _told_ you about the practicality of LinkedIn, yes? Put a face on the name, name to the face?" A meaty, warm hand comes to pat his shoulder. This is fine — something he’s managed to convey to the unspoken sensibility lodged deep inside Alex — this is acceptable, so long as it isn’t done too hard or lingers. "The blessing of a technological era?" His baritone dramatizes. 

Roy leisurely shrugs. “I like my job, no need to go hunting,” 

“Well, you never know how the tides may change, right contacts always come in handy,” Armstrong points out. 

Roy blinks at that. “Is this a not-so-subtle way of having me meet my replacement?” He asks, taking the opportunity to nod in Edward’s direction and tries not to be taken aback by how he starts progressing into a gradient of deep, cherry red. 

“Oh - don’t be like that,” Armstrong promptly chides. He would've punched his arm, too, had it not been established already that he doesn't react well to sudden force. “There’s no threat implicit in the term ‘adjutant’, you know”

Roy manages a slight smile — already the second one in a day. “If you say so,” 

Alex has waltzed away with an alarming spring on his step, considering the man’s overall size and the number of dangerous objects that are sitting around the tabletops. 

“I-I didn’t interview for a principal investigator position…” Edward tells him once he’s out of earshot. 

He turns to walk back towards the small inner office at the opposite end of the lab, hoping Edward picks up the cue to follow. “I know,” He says. “I was only trying to get on his nerves,”

He hears the younger man huff a little, a sound slightly punctuated by the uneven slack in his steps. 

He hadn’t noticed a limp before… Perhaps because he hadn’t known people with hurt legs could run at the speed of sound and plummet into you like a bulldozer, if tractors had their very own formula-1 sub-divisions. 

“Okay, well,” He says in a light tenor, “if that’s what you guys call banter around here…” 

Roy reaches for the set of keys that hang around a thin metal ring, hooking his pointer into the loop and giving it an absentminded twirl before they reach the door. 

It’s just one of those things, little things, like pushing his cuticles back with a thumb; like citing MLA instead of APA; like color-coding drawers; like using rechargeable fountain pens. One of those things that remind him of why slitting his throat the minute he gets home is an idea that’s best left postponed, at least for another day.

He’d first have to figure out what to do with the dog, anyhow. Suicidal people tend to be top-notch event planners, he isn’t willing to be the weak link. 

“It’s not,” Roy concedes, “I’m just technologically challenged and don’t want to have the whole networking conversation all over again,” 

Edward snorts. “Yeah, I’m not too crazy about social platforms, either,” 

Once inside, he nods in the direction of a small aluminum shelve over which Edward may keep his things for the time being. Most furniture might have to be shuffled around to fit the two of them, but the main desk is ample enough that they could simply add a second chair at the opposite end and work comfortably enough. 

“Right on,” Edward says, completely unbothered by their makeshift space planning. “this place is in for a pimping makeover,” 

Roy hums, giving it a going over himself even if he knows the office like the maimed back of his hand. “It’ll get the feng-shui treatment,”

At that, Edward lets out an uncompromised bark of laughter, hands on his hips, head slightly thrown back, maybe there’s even a dimple in there somewhere. “What’s with the world-renowned chemist believing in harmonious energy forces?” He asks. 

“Duality,” He answers, instead of the humble ‘ _I don’t know about world-renowned_ ’, instead of saying he doesn’t, that he’s a Nietzschean poser who purposefully misinterpreted Zarathustra as an excuse to not believe in anything, least of all furniture as a means of attaining spiritual elevation. 

He leaves it at that which only makes his new partner break out in further mirth. His shoulders stutter through the force of it, and Roy had never in his life thought himself funny. Not once. 

“They’ll take away all our grants for believing in pseudoscience but,” He says, rounding the desk with a slightly tilted head, the better to gauge the ways in which it could be shifted. “hell, we’ll have reached nirvana by then,” 

Roy feels the corners of his mouth begin to quirk at that — again. He doesn’t suppose any of this constitutes normal if they’ve only known each other for five minutes. 

Edward looks up at him and something shifts when their eyes meet. It must be quite the ability. To be able to trick the clock into believing it’s stopped just by looking at something. 

Roy thinks of how if the sun decided to explode, everyone would find out about eight minutes later. 

“Hey, um,” Edward swallows around a softening smile. “I’d like to apologize again, about earlier.” He says, trailing a distracted finger on the edge of a drawer, as if attempting to physically smooth out the situation while he tries to transition from Chinese geomancy to solemn discussions about manners and such. 

“Not just because it turns out we’ll be working together, obviously. I was just in a hurry and had a shit day yesterday but there’s no real excuse for how I acted, so. Yeah. I'm an ass sometimes. I’m sorry.” 

“You’re not an ass,” Roy decides. 

Edward smirks. “You sure you wanna make that assessment without a proper observation period first?” 

Roy shrugs. “I’ve developed an eye for these sorts of things,” He says, fully leaning into the half-assed quip. Why not. 

Riza makes him drop a quarter into a jar unofficially called ‘Deplorable Disability Puns’ every time he says something similar. It is staggeringly full, but Riza’s not here. 

“Academia is conducive to shitty character, you mean,” Edward quickly digresses, gaze pinned on the desk’s grey surface. 

There are actually way too many things Roy could be referring to, now that he thinks about it. Thirty is an acceptable enough age to start saying that you’ve been around, “seen some shit”. Know your way through the gritty expanse of the world. He’s been to too many places, business and pleasure and blood-boiling pain. Things that make one develop an antisocial character that no amount of group therapy or cognitive-behavioral strategies can scrub out. 

For now, he’ll settle with getting on Edward’s page. He still knows how to be friendly. 

“Understatement of the year,” He says. 

Edward laughs again, easy as the way in which he drops his weight on a chair. “Can I get a plaque that says so? It’s a hell of an achievement for someone who doesn’t know what discretion means,” He gives a twinkling grin. 

And it’s right then that he realizes, with the force of another blunt impact, that they’ll be seeing each other every day from now on. Roy has to remind himself to count back from twenty, in jumps of three. 

Twenty, seventeen, fourteen, eleven. So it goes. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know this year's been rather shit and we don't need the extra salt on the wound of existence; thank you for reading this despite the misery lmao. If anyone needs a hug hmu, if you need to grind my bones into dust with criticism and anger then I'm... down for that, too.


End file.
